Why 800MHz? Because it's a typical minimum of modern processors, at least the Intel ones I've used. You can get the minimum frequencies of your CPU cores with:

grep -H '' /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/cpuinfo_min_freq

Is it slow? Eight hundred million clock cycles per second is faster than CPUs were 30 years ago and is sufficient both for basic use and to play games from that era. However, it does noticeably slow down even some basic features on my system.

#CPU #underclocking

By the way, throttling the CPU to a constant frequency is the proper way to run the classic game Pharaoh (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharaoh_(video_game)). This game is too fast on modern computers because its default speed varies with the number of instructions the processor executes per second instead of being rooted in real time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elapsed_real_time). So, changing its speed settings (https://www.protondb.com/app/564530#BBh0duM0C0) isn't enough. It needs a stable clock rate.

#Pharaoh #Wine #Proton #LinuxGaming #retrogaming #time

Extra tip: if keeping your CPU at its minimum frequency slows down your system too much, you can use the base frequency instead:

( cd /sys/devices/system/cpu && for cpu in *[0-9]/ ; do cat <$cpu/cpufreq/base_frequency >$cpu/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq ; done )

This will generate more heat than staying at the minimum frequency, but less heat than letting the cores go higher.

#heatwave #ClimateAdaptation #CPU #downclocking #Linux